Ghost Town
by Bovineorbitor1
Summary: It's quiet. Too quiet. Very AU indeed.
1. Chapter 1

**One **

He always comes home past the witching hour, though not far enough past to be _safe;_ trailing moonlight and cigarette smoke in a host of inverted shadows. The sounds of his feet on pavement are curt in the escalating hush of early morning, never hurried but not inclined to linger either. The door to his apartment creaks exactly true to type.

Not even the artificial light the city cranks out as a warning, or a ward against predators, stops the night welling up like pitch in back streets but also the corridor leading to Gordon's bedroom. It's an odd sop to attentiveness which does not make him feel more appreciated.

**Two**

(In his dreams she sings to him, his city, and her dirty fingernails scrabble at his face with night-screams and scratching. As long as she is loving, he will be her instrument. Maybe even longer than that.

He clenches his teeth together and is silent through the baseline nightmares.

And in the morning, every morning, caught half way between worlds, he thinks he can hear something chittering near the ceiling. He opens his eyes and waits for the dawn light to castigate the interior regions of his skull. Wash until clean.)

**Three**

The light in his office flickers, snapping after the moths that swing dozy circles around it, and his fingers creak and groan like the floorboards. Like the entire goddamn building in a light breeze.

The goldfish he keeps at the office flit brightly about behind his back. They're there to cheer him up, but they chase each other around their square tank like cops and robbers, robbers and cops, cops and robbers.

Gordon's getting old and going nowhere because there's nothing to follow but the money and nowhere to lead to at all. Gotham is not a lady and she doesn't bother chewing before she swallows, so there's no warning about the imminence of defeat.

**Four**

Home is just a dream state. No wife and no kids, so there's nothing to come home to but the intimacy of torture on his mattress: wishful insomniac. The brushing of dawn's wings against the windows, huge and golden as the sky is ignited and immolates itself around its cluster of skyscrapers. Tower of Babel's lesser sin is breaking up the view.

But the corridor outside his room still holds to midnight.  
(She sinks her claws into his shoulders but the worst of it is loyalty. In comparison, being eaten alive is comfortable enough, and she sings him bright into morning afterwards.)

**I**

There's a whisper come alive on the streets, the real life genesis of legend or lunacy, and it's a living shadow that snaps out of nowhere and back in an instant. He doesn't really believe that such a thematically appropriate monster could exist, but the other men in the precinct talk about it in hushed voices and glance around nervously all the time. They've never been so attentive.

It's just a lie, he thinks as he looks at the crime scene photographs and the bloody handprints which decorate the baby's room. Just someone's undigested dream. There's no dark saviour stirring the streets when he walks home, trying not to see the splash of colour spreading between pictures. The stop motion pursuit chases him all the way up the stairs and makes the building rattle as if infested.

**declare**

(It's ghosts, his landlady said distastefully when he reported to her the symphony of creaks and rattles which kept him up with their persistence and regularity: there was a family murdered not far from here and the boy, you can tell he's not happy.

It's Gotham, you yourself think, etching her essence into every surface and vacancy. Liquid like the worst kind of memory.

Everything here acknowledges its own decay. The evidence is impossible to avoid.)

**a**

He slips between the sheets and fumbles his glasses onto the bedside table. Lets his eyes drop closed as, behind them, the city clamours. The moonlight goes out like a candle and a cat wails to a blank sky outside his window. He can't manage sleep, but tries for a thin substitute dozing.  
Gradually, and contrary to all logic, the cat acquires friends. Gordon staggers to the window to bang upon it, then to stick his head out and yell something sleep smudged and incomprehensible. The court of cats pay him no heed but a dark outline leaning against a wall on the opposite side of the street jerks round towards him, sketching surprise. He blinks, startled and embarrassed, and wakes up the next morning not remembering moving away from the window or dreaming any of his usual dreams.

**Gang **

"A dark creature sweeping down on the evildoer…" the man babbles, hands trembling as he draws with them in midair. Gordon scoffs into his coffee.  
"Things are getting crazy, aren't they?" Stevens asks philosophically a little later, and he deserves every second of the incredulous look Gordon gives him. "Well, alright, this is Gotham."  
Gordon presses down the urge to ask Stevens what _he_ dreams about. The next thing they know there's a sting of more concrete reports and an official enquiry.  
He's losing sleep over it.

**War**

One night, when he's at that eyes-screwed-together state of useless desperation, trying to will himself out of awareness and just inflating it, throwing it into relief – he can hear someone sobbing in the corner.  
(Ghosts, his landlady said.)  
He crawls onto his hands and knees and squints through burning eyes. "Hello?"  
The clock ticks its unwelcome countdown. The sobbing is ragged, less and less regular until it's interspaced with large stretches of silence. It sounds like a child. He feels like he should be afraid. "Is anybody there?"  
There's no answer, but he sees the glint of eyes in the corner, a child, and on instinct he extends a hand. "It's okay," he murmurs, as gently he can.  
"Are you coming?" the boy asks. He freezes, as though movement would be a commitment to something dangerous, and they sit like that, he with his hand still extended and starting to shake with the effort of not moving, until  
"Later, then," the boy says, and whispers back into nightmare.


	2. Chapter 2

**five**

"And ever since that night I have been unable to tell whether I am a man who dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly who is dreaming that he is a man."  
"You're a fairy," grumbled Flass, a more accurate heart of darkness than the rumour still buzzing about their wretched hive. The man he was interrogating looked bemused, which was a fair reversal, and Gordon snorted into his coffee, which was increasingly his confidant in all things.  
"What did I say? Crazy," said Stevens later. Gordon just shrugged. Faux philosophy was the least of their problems.

**six**

"You should drink less coffee," said the boy that evening, sitting on the end of his bed and swinging his legs back and forth. "It's interfering with your sleep patterns."  
"So are _you_," Gordon said, yanking the covers up around his moustache peevishly. He loses the high ground by doing it, but it makes him feel better.

The boy leaves, or possibly he just drops through into less cryptic dreams: Gordon can't tell. His headache is always with him now, but Gotham has been silent.

"I have not," said the boy. "You've just been trying not to pay attention."  
"Go away," he says, and counts to ten.

**Seven**

"Your name James Gordon?" asked the thug.  
"Why?" he asked. Hands up, chin out.  
"Got a bullet with that name on it," said the thug. Gordon was impressed. That was top tier repartee from this brand of wayside assassination squad.  
"Everyone knows who you are," another man said, and the shadow came down.

**Eight**

They stopped screaming eventually. Gordon left his hands in the air, although now it was more of a shrug, or an enquiry aimed heavenwards.  
"Are you coming?" asked the shadow, quite reasonably, one vague boot resting on a sobbing man's head.  
"Where are you going?" he asked. His voice didn't tremble much. He put his hands in his pockets hurriedly.  
"We don't know for sure." More and more like a person, the shadow cocked its head and watched him softly under its eyelashes. "Will you?"  
"Not yet," he said, then because he didn't know why he had, he added, "this can't be real."  
"Not yet," came the reply, twisted up almost in a laugh, and from nowhere.

He went home in a daze, which was essentially suicide for a cop in Gotham, but no one touched him: no one even came near him. It was as though he were invisible, except he could feel someone's eyes fixed on the back of his head.

**It's**

"Could be fever," Stevens says, pressing the back of his hand against Gordon's forehead. "You've been looking pretty run down these last few weeks, Jim."  
"Right." Gordon pulled back his chair and slumped down over the desk. "Lot to do." _I've been getting more sleep_, he doesn't say, although the dreams still hurt. "Maybe a bit of a cold."  
"Dunno if I should tell you to see a doctor or get a hobby." Stevens sat down on Gordon's paperwork and sighed. It was a strangely empty, small sound, too grave for the half-levity of their conversations. "Not much point working yourself into the grave here, Jim."  
"Even that wouldn't be very restful, from the look of things," Gordon murmured. Stevens frowned, then laughed incredulously.  
"You think the crazy vigilante guy is a _ghost_?"  
"Of course not," Gordon said, shuffling his files. "That would be ridiculous."  
Somewhere down the hall the Commissioner was shouting and banging things. Stevens stood hurriedly; picked up one of the files and changed his general attitude to one of intense if stationary busyness.  
"If it were to happen anywhere," he muttered from behind his file as Loeb stormed past the open door, "it would be in Gotham."

**Getting**

It seems rather sad as she settles her feathers about him. _Don't you still love me, James?_  
_I do, but..._He doesn't know what to say.  
She is not on fire any more: her walls are slicked with rain - the monotonous kind which isn't usually used in her pathetic fallacies. She's bleached the colours away, or maybe is just too tired to perform for him this time.  
_It will be harder,_ she warns him, _if you do it this way._  
He listens to the sound of her voice, discordance and scavenger birds and jazz music, and to the words, and to the absences in between the words – listens properly, this time.  
_How long have you been waiting for this?_ he asks. She smiles_, smiles_; broken panes and blackening teeth and loveliness, and is vast and focused just on him. On his guilt, calling through the empty streets.  
_As long as you have,_ she says, sadly.

_**Far...**_

The vigilante ups his game that very night. Carmine Falcone is strapped across the light and _this is it_, thinks Gordon: this is the first concrete sign. Before now even the bruises healed too quickly and none of the allegations would stick, but this is real, real, real: you could tell from the paperwork.

The mob stirs in Gotham's underbelly, uncertain but stung, Gordon waits all week for the sky to fall, but it only seems inclined to rain.  
This is it, he knows, but there might still be time to get out.

_**Too...**_

The rich boy arrives in town, claiming memory. It only takes a day for the city to decide he is who he says he is, and the rumour mills spin out elaborate, contradictory back-stories to which he smiles confirmation.  
Gordon knows there is no such person, but he doesn't tell.  
There's some business with speeding tickets and then he meets the boy in the station, grave eyed behind the glittering smile.  
"James Gordon, isn't it?" he asks.  
"I think you know who I am, Mr Wayne," Gordon replies, looking at the dark patches under the man's eyes and carefully noticing the way he is slightly less material when he stands in the shade.  
Bruce smiles, smiles, though his teeth are perfect. "I think I do. Would you care to come for a business lunch with me, Commissioner? I have some proposals I would like to put to you."  
"Yes, of course," says Gordon, then, a beat later, "I'm _not_ the Commissioner!"  
Almost a laugh. "_Not yet."_

_**Late...**_

It might be a little past witching hour, though not far enough past to be _safe_.  
"It won't be easy," the boy says. He looks tired, though he can't have been alive long. Gordon wonders where he got such perfect table manners from, then.  
"Nothing has been until now, either," he says back, although that's too pat, really: it will be harder than that makes it sound. Death hadn't stopped the shadow, but life had certainly slowed Gordon down.

A monster in his myth, the boy looks down at his hands on the table. Gordon wants to tell him that it will be okay, but can't.  
"This is it," he says instead; breathes it as he touches the back of the other man's hand lightly: "This is it."


End file.
